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Review: THE ROVER

By Darin Skaggs David Michod’s The Rover takes place sometime in the post-apocalyptic future somewhere in Australia. Our protagonist, Eric (Guy Pearce) stops at one of the may beat down towns to grab a drink. While there a truck crashes across the road. They climb out of the truck, clearly in a hurry and steal Eric’s car. When Eric finds out about this he takes their truck and tries to get his car back. After a bit of a struggle Eric passes out, he wakes up and immediately goes after his car again soon running into Reynolds (Robert Pattinson) who Eric finds out is the brother of the man who stole his car. They then go on a tense road trip to find and take back his vehicle. The Rover is absolutely brilliant, but first let us discuss the elephant in the room, Robert Pattison. He gives a wonderful performance, and has given a few in the last couple years that totally shadow the aphetic acting from the Twilight series. He gives a pretty subtle performance here. You can feel his sadness, you can see he is confused and you can sense his anger even though the script doesn’t make him come right out and say it. Pearce gives an equally great, if not better, performance but that doesn’t mean we should cloud Pattinson’s great work here. A big part of the film is the mystery of why Eric is obsessively chasing down his car. When we finally do find out why he needs his car the first reaction is to find ourselves angry at this guy, he does so many bad actions just for this one moment. Once it all settles in though you will probably get why he needed to do this. It is all about loss; Eric does a lot to get his car back. It is like he does not care about the harm he is bringing others like a person going through the grieving process; he just needs to do what he needs to do. He also seems to not want to connect with anyone else, he asks questions he wants answered but totally ignores other people’s questions and concerns. That is until he meets Reynolds. At first he is just using him to find the man who steals his car but eventually the film kind of becomes a very, very dark buddy movie. The Rover is an intense thriller. It is a very odd buddy film, with two very great performances. The film lets you feel the dread, loneliness and general sadness from the world all because of the technical aspects. It is one of the best of the year while still being a hard pill to swallow.